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This, my third book on the Tudor succession and the culmination of fifteen years of research, attempts to record their story, amongst the secrets and behind the riddles. My last two books cover later Tudor history and it was intimidating to consider how I might approach the earlier reigns. It was something David Starkey wrote in his biography of the young Henry VIII – Virtuous Prince – that encouraged me to begin before Bosworth: ‘The story of how Henry Tudor [(i.e. Henry VII)] survived against the odds, and won his throne and his bride against even greater odds, is one of the world’s great adventure stories.’ It sounded irresistible, and indeed how could one understand the king, if you only began his life in 1485?
    As I began my research in 2008 I came across another inspiring piece of writing: an article written in the TLS by the eminent historian Cliff Davies. It said, essentially, that there was no such thing as the Tudors, and the word was hardly used or known during the Tudor period. You might think that given I was writing a big, fat book on the Tudors I might not be too thrilled by that, but I read further articles he had written on this and found them all fascinating. I believe the Tudors did have a strong sense of family – even if they did not exactly boast about their humble Welsh origins – but Cliff Davies helped me shift perspective, to examine more closely not how we see the Tudors from our end of the telescope, but how they saw themselves. The Tudors constantly looked to the past as a guide to their actions. To understand what they did and why, we have to know that past. It helped me answer why the princes in the Tower were ‘disappeared’ in 1483, and why Henry VII didn’t investigate their disappearance in 1485 – the source of so many conspiracy theories. It helped explain why Anne Boleyn was beheaded with a sword (clue: Henry VIII was not wondering how she would like to die); it also led me to discover what Henry is really supposed to have quarrelled about with his niece Margaret Douglas in 1547.
    As with my last book I found that separating later comment on the lives of Tudor women from their actual lives was very revealing. Women of this period were often later depicted as either useless, or suspiciously successful, in which case somewhere along the line it is suggested they are ‘unnatural’ or a bit mad. Like Frances Brandon, Margaret Beaufort has been much maligned, as has Mary Tudor, and while I don’t sugar-coat their actions I hope I have helped further erase their old caricatures. I was also very interested in the life of Margaret Douglas. The importance of her place in the succession issues and family politics of the 1560s helped add another dimension to what I already knew about that decade from the work I had done on Katherine Grey for my biography of the Grey sisters – but it is the whole sweep of Margaret’s life that is so extraordinary, from thedramatic circumstances of her birth, to her years at Henry VIII’s court, to her plotting her son Darnley’s marriage to Mary, Queen of Scots, and, after her death, her grandson, James, becoming King of England. Where I cover the Greys again I have tried to add material to my earlier biography of the sisters; it was looking at Jane from Mary’s perspective, for example, that led me to conclude that it is (ironically) with Mary that the legend of the Innocent Traitor originates.
    This may seem difficult to believe, but I have endeavoured to keep names to a minimum. Many well-known figures don’t get a mention. Those people who do get named are sometimes referred to by their title and sometimes not: the choice depends on what I think will be easier for the reader to remember. If, for example, they change title in the space of a few pages or chapters, or follow hard on the heels of someone else by the same title, or share the same title (like Jasper Tudor and William